Proclaiming the Scandal of the Cross: Contemporary Images of the Atonement

By Baker Publishing Group

Because many modern Christians can offer a reasonable explanation of the meaning of Jesus' death on the cross, they find it hard to understand the confusion displayed by the disciples after the events in the last pages of the Gospels. But if Paul were alive today, he would find it inexplicable that we modern believers are not scandalized by the cross.

Proclaiming the Scandal of the Cross introduces pastors, church leaders, students, and lay readers to the need for contextualized atonement theology, offering creative examples of how the cross can be proclaimed today in culturally relevant and transformative ways. It makes helpful suggestions on how this vision for a culturally relevant message might be developed. The impressive list of contributors includes writings from C. S. Lewis, Rowan Williams, Frederica Mathewes-Green, Brian McLaren, and many more who are actively working out just how to make this life-transforming proclamation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
• Release date: Dec 1, 2006
• ISBN: 9781441206275

Book preview

Proclaiming

the Scandal

of the Cross

Proclaiming

the Scandal

of the Cross

Contemporary Images of the Atonement

Edited by

Mark D. Baker

© 2006 by Mark D. Baker

Published by Baker Academic

a division of Baker Publishing Group

P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287

www.bakeracademic.com

Printed in the United States of America

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Proclaiming the scandal of the cross : contemporary images of the atonement / edited by Mark D. Baker.

    p. cm.

    Includes bibliographical references.

    ISBN 10: 0-8010-2742-X (pbk.)

    ISBN 978-0-8010-2742-0 (pbk.)

    1. Atonement. 2. Jesus Christ-Crucifixion. I. Baker, Mark D. (Mark David), 1957-

BT265.3P76 2006

232’.3—dc22

2006024577

Present by Luci Shaw first appeared in Radix magazine (vol. 31, no. 1); subsequently collected in What the Light Was Like by Luci Shaw (La Porte, IN: WordFarm, 2006). Used with compliments of WordFarm, www.wordfarm.net.

Permission to reprint The Forgiveness of Sins originally included in Open to Judgement (UK title) and A Ray of Darkness (U.S. title), has been granted by Darton, Longman & Todd (1 Spencer Court, 140–142 Wandsworth High Street, London, SW18 4JJ; www.darton-longman-todd.co.uk; 020 8875 0155) and Cowley Publications (907 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02139; www.cowley.org; 800-225-1534). Copyright 1994, 1995 Rowan Williams, all rights reserved.

Extracts from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis copyright © C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. 1950, are reprinted by permission.

Scripture quotations labeled CEV are from the Contemporary English Version © 1991, 1992, 1995 by American Bible Society. Used by permission.

Scripture quotations labeled KJV are from the King James Version of the Bible.

Scripture quotations labeled NIV are from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations labeled NRSV are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations labeled RSV are from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1952 [2nd edition, 1971] by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

This book is dedicated to my daughters

Julia and Christie

Contents

List of Contributors

1 Contextualizing the Scandal of the Cross Mark D. Baker

2 Deeper Magic Conquers Death and the Powers of Evil C. S. Lewis

3 Rising Victorious Frederica Mathewes-Green

4 Atonement in the Coffee Shop Chris Friesen

5 A Different Story: Mark 15:21–39 Debbie Blue

6 Atonement as Drama in a Sunday School Class Dan Whitmarsh

7 The Forgiveness of Sins: Hosea 11:1–9; Matthew 18:23–35 Rowan Williams

8 Atonement: A Beach Parable for Youth Mark D. Baker

9 Made New by One Man’s Obedience: Romans 5:12–19 Richard B. Hays

10 Participation and an Atomized World: A Reflection on Christ as Representative New Adam Steve Taylor

11 The Cross as Prophetic Action Brian D. McLaren

12 Naked but Unashamed Doug Frank

13 The Family Table Grace Y. May

14 Jesus, the Ultimate Outsider Mike McNichols

15 A Father’s Advocacy Ryan Schellenberg

16 Present Luci Shaw

17 Salvation through the Sacrifice of God’s Firstborn Son Gwinyai H. Muzorewa

18 He Shared Our Aches Curtis Chang

19 Absorbing the Three D’s of Death Steve Todd

20 Go and Do Likewise Mark D. Baker

Notes

Contributors

Mark D. Baker is associate professor of mission and theology at Mennonite Brethren Biblical Seminary in Fresno, California. He was a missionary in Honduras for ten years and has authored books in Spanish and English, including Religious No More: Building Communities of Grace and Freedom.

Debbie Blue is one of the founding pastors of House of Mercy Church in St. Paul, Minnesota. She is the author of Sensual Orthodoxy, a collection of sermons, and is currently at work on a book about how Christians tend to make the Bible an idol and how the Word resists.

Curtis Chang is the teaching pastor at the River Church Community, San Jose, California. He previously served with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship for eight years and is the author of Engaging Unbelief: A Captivating Strategy from Augustine and Aquinas.

Doug Frank is a professor at the Oregon Extension, an interdisciplinary program where students can attend to their deepest questions during a semester of intensive reading, writing, and conversation. He attends Lincoln Christian Church in a small community amid the southern Oregon mountains, where he lives and works. He is the author of Less Than Conquerors: How Evangelicals Entered the Twentieth Century.

Chris Friesen has been serving in pastoral ministry at Lendrum Mennonite Brethren Church in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

Richard B. Hays is the George Washington Ivey Professor of New Testament at Duke Divinity School, Durham, North Carolina. He is an ordained United Methodist minister and author of a number of books including: The Moral Vision of the New Testament: Community, Cross, New Creation and The Conversion of the Imagination: Paul as Interpreter of Israel’s Scripture.

C. S. Lewis was an Anglican layman who taught literature, first at Oxford University and later at Cambridge University. He had been an atheist and converted to Christianity in his midthirties. Lewis wrote poetry, novels, and nonfiction works, and his many books include works on theology, apologetics, and literary criticism. He died in 1963.

Frederica Mathewes-Green is a columnist for Beliefnet.com, and a film reviewer for National Review Online. She regularly contributes to Christianity Today, First Things, Touchstone, and other publications. Her recent books include: The Illumined Heart: The Ancient Christian Path of Transformation and Facing East: A Pilgrim’s Journey into the Mysteries of Orthodoxy. She is the Khouria (spiritual mother) of Holy Cross Antiochian Orthodox Church near Baltimore, where her husband is the pastor.

Grace Y. May is an ordained minister of the Presbyterian Church (USA). She is currently serving as the associate pastor of the English Ministry at the First Chinese Presbyterian Church in New York City’s Chinatown. While living in the Boston area she pastored at the Chinese Christian Church of New England and previously served at the African-American Roxbury Presbyterian Church. She has contributed to The Global God: Multicultural Evangelical Views of God and Growing Healthy Asian-American Churches.

Brian D. McLaren served for twenty-four years as the founding pastor of Cedar Ridge Community Church, an innovative church near Washington, D.C. More than half of the several hundred people who attend Cedar Ridge were previously unchurched. He has written a number of books including: The Secret Message of Jesus; A Generous Orthodoxy; and the A New Kind of Christian trilogy (www.brianmclaren.net).

Mike McNichols is the pastor of Soulfarers Community, a Vineyard Church in Fullerton, California, that he and a team of friends planted in 1997. He also works with Fuller Theological Seminary’s Southern California Extension program. He has worked as an elementary school teacher and principal, and also in marketing. He recently completed a doctoral project—a novel about postmodern evangelism titled, The Bartender.

Gwinyai H. Muzorewa, originally from Zimbabwe, is an ordained minister of the United Methodist Church. He is professor of theology and chair of the Religion Department at Lincoln University, Pennsylvania. He has written four books, including The Origin and Development of African Theology and Mwari: The Great Being God.

Ryan Schellenberg recently graduated from Mennonite Brethren Biblical Seminary in Fresno, California, with an M.A. in New Testament. He is from Hepburn, Saskatchewan, and is pursuing a Ph.D. in New Testament at the Toronto School of Theology.

Luci Shaw was the cofounder and later president of Harold Shaw Publishers and since 1988 has been an adjunct faculty member and Writer in Residence at Regent College, Vancouver, Canada. She lives in Bellingham, Washington, and is a member of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church. She is author of numerous books of poetry and prose, including Water Lines: New and Selected Poems; Water My Soul: Cultivating the Interior Life; and What the Light Was Like. She has also coauthored three books with Madeleine L’Engle, including A Prayer Book for Spiritual Friends.

Steve Taylor is pastor at Opawa Baptist Church, Christchurch, New Zealand, and lecturer in practical theology at the Bible College of New Zealand. He has planted an emerging church, Graceway Baptist Church, Auckland, New Zealand, and is author of The Out of Bounds Church? Learning to Create Communities of Faith in a Culture of Change.

Steve Todd is the founding pastor of Horizons Community Church, a United Methodist Church started in 1996 in suburban Lincoln, Nebraska. He has pastored other Methodist churches in Nebraska since 1981.

Dan Whitmarsh is the lead pastor at Lakebay Community Church (Evangelical Covenant Church) in Lakebay, Washington.

Rowan Williams is the Archbishop of Canterbury. He has written a number of books, including A Ray of Darkness: Sermons and Reflections and Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel.

1

Contextualizing the Scandal of the Cross

MARK D. BAKER

Since many Christians today can easily offer an explanation of the meaning of Jesus’s death on the cross, they find it hard to understand the bewilderment and confusion of the two disciples described at the end of Luke’s Gospel on their way to Emmaus. They had understood Jesus’s ministry in terms borrowed from expectation of a liberator like Moses;1 hence, they had no interpretive tools for making sense of his execution at the hands of the Romans. Paul, however, would likely find it quite understandable that the disciples were confused and find it harder to understand that the cross does not scandalize us. In 1 Corinthians 1:18–25, the apostle outlines a perspective on the cross that many of us have learned to overlook. Here he testifies to the lunacy of the cross for first-century Romans, matched by its ignominious character among the Jewish people.2

The Christian proclamation of a crucified malefactor was moronic to persons weaned on a love of learning, virtuousness, and aesthetic pleasure. The Messiah, like Moses before him, should evidence the power of God in ways that legitimate his status and augur deliverance from the tyranny and oppressiveness of imperial subjugation. In that context the cross has the appearance of absurdity, not of good news. The message of the cross calls for a worldview shift of colossal proportions because it subverts conventional, taken-for-granted ways of thinking and knowing.

Joel Green and I wrote Recovering the Scandal of the Cross: Atonement in New Testament and Contemporary Contexts with the conviction that the most common contemporary explanation of the atonement, penal satisfaction, has in some contexts muted the scandal of the cross, in other settings inappropriately scandalized people, and in still other circumstances made the saving significance of the cross and resurrection incomprehensible.3 Unfortunately, many see penal satisfaction as the sole way of proclaiming the saving significance of the cross. We argued that an important first step in recovering the scandal of the cross is to recognize the diversity of atonement images used both in the New Testament and in the teaching and preaching of the church since the first century. We sought not just to display that diversity, however, but also to ask what we can learn from the New Testament and church history that can guide us in our articulation of the atonement in diverse contexts today.

We are thankful that many have found the book liberating and illuminating and have told us how it has helped them to experience the challenge and good news of the scandalous cross of Jesus Christ. We are also grateful for the conversation the book has generated. Although much of that has centered on biblical and theological issues, the question of articulation has also been prominent. In fact, many have repeatedly intimated to us that they had given up on preaching the atonement but have found in our work renewed challenge and resources for reflecting anew on the saving significance of the cross. Others have said something like this: You have led me to think quite differently about the atonement, but now how do I preach about the atonement? Or, Great material, but can you give me a five-minute explanation that I can use in evangelism? This new volume, Proclaiming the Scandal of the Cross, is my response to those questions. It presents examples of people in concrete settings using images and stories to communicate the saving significance of the cross and resurrection.

In this introductory chapter I first aim to summarize some key points from Recovering the Scandal of the Cross, including guidelines for contextualization. Then I discuss why this book offers alternatives to the penal satisfaction theory of the atonement through responding to some critiques of Recovering the Scandal, and through explaining how I imagine this book being helpful to people with different atonement theologies. Finally, I give a brief explanation of the format of the book and how the presentations in the book relate to each other and the project we sketched in Recovering the Scandal.

NEW TESTAMENT ATONEMENT TEACHING: AN OVERVIEW

Constructive and missional aims drove our survey of New Testament atonement teaching in Recovering the Scandal of the Cross. We did not seek simply to report what Luke, Paul, or John stated about the atonement, but also to observe their theological and missiological concerns in order to communicate better the saving significance of the cross and resurrection in our own time and contexts.

The New Testament contains a rich diversity of atonement teaching and imagery. Indeed, the contextual rootedness of the New Testament is perhaps nowhere on display more than in its atonement theology. Drawing on the language and thought patterns of Israel’s religion and life experiences within the larger Greco-Roman world, these writers struggled to make sense of Jesus’s crucifixion. Within the pages of the New Testament, the saving significance of the death of Jesus is represented chiefly (though not exclusively) via five constellations of images. Each set of imagery is borrowed from significant spheres of public life in ancient Palestine and the larger Greco-Roman world: the court of law (for justification), commercial dealings (redemption), personal relationships (reconciliation, whether among individuals or groups), worship (sacrifice), and the battleground (triumph over evil).

Why does the New Testament enlist so many images for its atonement theology? First, because language for the atonement is metaphorical, and given the nature of metaphor, it is difficult to imagine that one soteriological model could express all that one may truly say about the saving significance of Jesus’s death. Hence, even if Christians have always spoken with one voice in their general affirmation of Jesus as our Savior, already in the New Testament, and certainly since, readers have understood this affirmation in various ways.

A second reason for the plurality of New Testament images for the atonement is pastoral. In what language one construes the efficacy of Jesus’s death is dependent in part on the needs one hopes to address. Chris Tuckett has similarly observed, Very different models and categories are used to describe the ‘lost’ condition of the human race prior to Christ. . . . Different descriptions of the human situation inevitably lead to different explanations of how this has been altered by the work of Christ.4 If people are lost, they need to be found. If they are oppressed by hostile powers, they need to be delivered. If they exist in a state of enmity, they need to be reconciled. And so on.

Third, the early Christians used a plurality of metaphors to draw out the salvific significance of Jesus’s death and resurrection because of wider cultural considerations. If hearers in ever-expanding cultural circles are to grasp the message of salvation, then leaders must articulate that message in culture-specific ways.

Thus, a central and fundamental guideline we learn from the New Testament authors is the importance of using a variety of images to proclaim the scandal of the cross: different contexts require different images.

Just as highlighting the distinctness of individual writings and metaphors provides us valuable guidance, so too looking at common themes of the whole provides theological guidelines as we work to articulate the meaning of Jesus’s death and resurrection in new contexts. In Recovering the Scandal of the Cross, then, we attempted to derive orientation points from the New Testament as landmarks for constructive work in atonement theology. Although they leave plenty of room for creative theological reflection, these four guidelines also provide crucial points of orientation in our reflection.

The first of these turns the spotlight on the human predicament. One may articulate lostness in a variety of ways—blindness, deafness, hard-heartedness, slavery to an evil power, enmity, and so on—but one of the constants in the equation of biblical thinking about the atonement is the acute need of the human community. Humanity lacks the wherewithal to save itself and needs help (salvation, redemption, deliverance, and so on) from the outside, from God.

A second coordinate is the necessity of human response that flows out of the gracious act of God. The salvific work of God has not yet run its full course, but the lives of God’s people must already begin to reflect the new reality (new creation) to which God is moving history. We are saved from bad things, it is true, but we are also saved for something. Atonement theology in the New Testament does not simply hold tightly to the work of Christ; it also opens wide its arms to embrace and guide the lives of Christians. Believers—having been redeemed, reconciled, delivered, bought, justified, and so on—are now released and empowered to reflect in their lives the quality of life exemplified by their Savior. This life is modeled after the cross and has service as its basic orientation. We must not separate atonement theology from ethics.

Between the human predicament and the imperative of human response is the divine drama, the ultimate manifestation of God’s love. This is the third coordinate: God, acting on the basis of his covenant love, on his own initiative, was at work in the cross of Christ for human salvation. The New Testament portrays Gol-gotha along two story lines—one with God as (acting) subject, the other with Jesus as (acting) subject. It will not do, therefore, to characterize the atonement as God’s punishment falling on Christ (God as subject, Christ as object) or as Christ’s appeasement or persuasion of God (Christ as subject, God as object). At the same time, however paradoxical it may seem, what happened on the cross for our atonement was, according to the New Testament, a consequence of God’s initiative, a demonstration of divine love. As Paul summarizes, employing one model among many possibilities, God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself (2 Cor. 5:19 KJV). Again, God proves [displays] his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us (Rom. 5:8 NRSV).

Fourth, and as a corollary to the three previous themes, New Testament atonement theology accords privilege to no one group over another. What happened on the cross was of universal significance—in the language of the day, for Jew and Gentile, for slave and free, for male and female (Gal. 3:28). The cross was the expression of God’s grace for all, for all persons as well as for all creation. Atonement theology thus repudiates ancient and modern attempts to segregate people away from the gracious invitation of God, to possess as one’s own the gift of God available to all humanity, and even to presume that the work of God in Christ is focused only on humanity, without regard for the whole cosmos.

We can also gain missiological guidelines from the New Testament authors for the task of articulating the atonement. First, we must avoid the temptation to simply read their words and metaphors into our world. Rather, we must seek to use words and metaphors that communicate similar content in our